'Just me, in a 300 SLR on an empty track'

How do you drive a car that's worth more than £100m? As Andrew Frankel will tell you, very carefully... for this is the ultimate W196 S, chassis 10 – Mercedes' planned racer for '56

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Coming off the banking in full flight, straight-eight motor roaring with crazed approval, pushing forward from second to third with all the conviction I can muster, feeling the thrust and seeing that long, silver bonnet sloping away ahead of me, briefly it doesn't seem real. Nor even close to it. This is not 'just' a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, but in engineering terms, the ultimate 300 SLR. No journalist has ever been allowed to drive it. Yet here I am: no rules, no chaperon. Just me, Mercedes' own test track and the SLR, one of the most rare and special cars not only in its unique collection, but the world.

At this title we know the SLR in general and one, chassis 0004/55, in particular. It's the car in which Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson won the 1955 Mille Miglia after which the latter wrote his account, made no copy and dropped it into a postbox in Brescia. So we owe it at least in part to the Italian postal service that probably the greatest single story in the history of motor sport journalism found its way onto the cover of this magazine.

This is not that car. There were 10 SLRs in total, if you include 0009/55 which was never assembled. All survive to this day save 0006/55 which was lost in the Le Mans disaster, though we should remember that chassis 0007/55 and 0008/55 are the unraced Uhlenhaut coupés, which when the latter sold in 2022 fetched £115m, beat the record for the most money ever paid for a car at auction by £75m and made the top 10 of the most expensive items of any kind sold that way. If you're going to go large, go large.